We have been friends forever — well, since the days when we worked together at the newspaper and had “safety meetings” on Friday nights after work.

She would stay and nurse one beer and bug out after a while and I would stay and stay and stay. Yahoo! Those were the days! Now we are old. This is what they call the Golden Years. 

I always say it’s better than the alternative. I’ve been to many funerals. Too many. But the Golden Years are not what they lead you to believe. I could go on and on, and I will some other time. 

Back to the green nail polish. I sell beauty products with catalogs for a company that will remain nameless for these purposes. I like to paint my nails in bright colors like orange and pink and especially bright red. Also, there is something joyful to me about having all those pretty colors lined up on my dresser.

It reminds me of my childhood and my best friend’s big sister. She was much older than us — sixth grade! She had a whole dresser full of nail polish lined up, and we got into it one day. I don’t remember the repercussions, but I lived through it to tell this story. I remember nail polish on the dresser, but I swear that was there before!

 I decided it was time to move on with the times, and I bought some pretty green stuff called “clover.” Green in my favorite color, and all the girls were wearing that color at least a few years ago. I am not ready for black. 

The green was not a pretty sight on me. It brought out all the colors in my hands. Bet you didn’t know you had greens and blues in your hands!

Well, I did with that green polish on. I began thinking this would be great if I was dressed for Halloween and it brought out the green in my complexion. Then I began to wonder if this was what I would look like when I die, and it made me feel kinda funny, in a bad, bad way. 

My friend called in the middle of all these thoughts, and our talk turned to the old days, then nail polish. She always has done her own manicures, and her nails looked wonderful. She was talking about throwing away all of her bottles of nail polish and how many colors she had.

It made me sad because I thought of all the pretty colors lined up on her dresser being thrown away. She said they had gotten old and it was ridiculous to have so many; she was just going to buy two or three. She thought her hands were old looking and she had arthritis in one and she didn’t want to draw attention to her hands. 

Self-perception is something we struggle with in the Golden Years. Half the time we don’t notice we have aged when everyone else around us knows we obviously have. The other times, we only see our hands, our age spots, our wrinkles, the gray hair and all the things that shout out “Hello, you old fart!”

What my friend doesn’t know is that I noticed her nails a few weeks ago when I went to visit her. They were still as pretty as I remembered, and I was still as envious as I always was of them. I didn’t see old hands. I didn’t see the painful arthritic marks on her fingers. I saw my old friend I always think of as an angel. I am sad to think her dresser will only have one or two nail polish colors because she thinks she is too old to wear bright colors. 

Needless to say, I promptly removed the green nail polish. I looked twenty years younger. I will save those hideous — I mean lovely colors for the youngsters and stay with the bright colors that make me feel younger but not dead. 

By the way, I have some green nail polish for sale, cheap. It doesn’t even go with all the other colors on my dresser.